Do evaluative attitudes 'track' moral facts?

The Darwinian Dilemma, introduced by Sharon Street, is based on a simple empirical point: evolutionary forces have played a crucial role in the development of human evaluative attitudes. But, if this is the case, Street claims, then moral realists, who believe that there exist normative truths independent of our evaluative attitudes, have to explain the relation between those truths and the evaluative attitudes. The dilemma is simple. If realists accept that evaluative attitudes have evolved to track natural moral facts, then they have to provide an account of that tracking (which they have failed to do). If, on the other hand, they reject this assumption, then they are directly confronted with skepticism: there would be no reason (apart from a gigantic coincidence) to think that our attitudes reflect some independent moral facts. In his criticism of Street, David Copp attempts to provide a realist account of moral truths that will not be vulnerable to the Darwinian Dilemma. He proceeds by specifying the nature of the truth conditions of moral propositions, stipulating that a given moral proposition is true if a morally authoritative standard enjoys a particular truth-grounding status. For Copp, the morally authoritative standard is the normative code that would best serve the basic needs of a society, if it were to serve as its moral code (2008, p.199). According to this “society-centered” theory, morality has the function of “enabling society to meet its needs” (p.198). If we accept this account, Copp claims, then we can provide a realist account of morality compatible with the evolutionary explanation of the evaluative attitudes: the evolved attitudes would favor behavior that is very similar to the behavior favored my the social moral code; i.e. the evaluative attitudes effectively ‘track’ (or ‘quasi-track’) moral truths.

But, the variant of moral realism that Copp offers falls radically short of properly addressing the Darwinian dilemma. Namely, the crucial challenge that Sharon Street has posed to the moral realist is the following: explain the striking coincidence between the evolved behavior and the independent moral truths posited by the realist (either by providing an account of the ‘tracking’ or by postulating a different type of relation)!  But, what Copp has proposed is simply an axiomatic re-iteration of this coincidence put forward as a realist theory. Far from explaining the ‘tracking’ account, he arbitrarily postulates a standard that has a truth-grounding status, and then ‘demonstrates’ that the moral truths ‘grounded’ in this standard are bound to be the same as those favored by the evolved evaluative attitudes. But, what is at stake is precisely the explanation of the coincidence (if independence of moral truths is to be postulated). Namely, what (if not the evolved evaluative apparatus) justifies the normative weight of the societal moral code? In virtue of which principle are those moral codes natural truths? Here, to simply postulate that those moral codes “better enable a society to meet its basic needs” (p.199) is utterly insufficient, since it is only a re-formulation of the evolutionary account (Copp does not offer any alternative justification of the principle). And, this is particularly problematic since the evolutionary account succeeds in explaining the emergence of those social codes without postulating any normative truths. Effectively, Copp is completely stranded: if he wants to put forward a theory of normative realism, he needs to offer us a “principle of normativity” – explaining why it is the case that a social code that enables a better social functioning should be considered as really authoritative. In the absence of such a principle, he is simply proposing an evolutionary account enriched with an axiomatic postulation of moral truths (thoroughly unexplained).

David Copp is not successful in providing a theory of moral realism not vulnerable to the Darwinian Dilemma. Instead, he is arbitrary postulating a moral (natural) standard and then re-iterating the coincidence between the evolved behavior and the supposed moral facts. A proper moral realism does not need an axiomatic definition of moral truths; it needs a plausible evolutionary model of explaining the relation between those truths and evolved evaluative attitudes.

This message was brought to you by...  ASN: a post-rocker, a post-roller, a Hegelian-Deleuzian, a street philosopher, a George Carlin wannabe, a phenomenological bullshitter, an Arsenal freak...